roadways was erased. They knew how important all this was to visiting parents.
Grete poured Mrs. Ehrlichâs coffee and buttered her roll.
âBugle on time today. Campers and teachers are in Mess Hall. Flag is up like always,â Grete said in the pleasant voice she always used to the directors. She felt it necessary to make this morning report to Mrs. Ehrlich as she lay in bed, knowing she was always pleased to hear that all was going well, as usual. Mrs. Ehrlich was the picture of contentment, stretching her short, fat legs under the sheet. Grete considered it important to ingratiate herself, because Ibâs drinking threatened their security. Summer jobs were essential to them.
It was not that Grete loved Ib, not in the least, not ever. When he had too much to drink, he enjoyed using his belt on her buttocks and twisting her long hair so tightly it threatened to pull away from her head. Or he would extend her earlobes so painfully during his (never their) lovemaking as a show of force, accompanied by rough assaults on her breasts and thighs.
Every night during the summer, full of drink, he demanded that she lie down under him; every night she wished him dead. After he fell into a heavy sleep, she planned the escapes she might make if cirrhotic death or lung disease did not claim him soon. To her, their union (he was Danish, she Norwegian) was an example of mistaken intermarriage. She had agreed to it because he was about to become an American citizen and she wished to realize the promises of the golden land of America she had come to: high salaries, new automobiles, fur coats, and modern kitchens.
Ibâs motives for entering into marriage were equally crass. He had failed to find a woman in Copenhagen willing to submit for any length of time to his distinctive ways of achieving his pleasure, the same attacks he enjoyed inflicting on small animals, and upon men smaller and weaker than he. This uncontained violence, necessary to fire his arid soul and his lax sexual organ, had sent him to jail in Odensee, where he had gone to take a job as an apprentice baker and to find a willing female for his blows and pinches, yanks and drubbings.
His incarceration there had been brief. He had been found guilty of drunkenness and assault upon a prostitute, both very minor offenses. He passed his days in jail baking for the prisoners and his nights methodically, pleasurably battering himself. Freed in a few months, and sick of Denmark, he obtained a berth as a baker on a steamship and sailed to New York. Immediately he applied for his papers.
Almost as quickly he found a job with the Horn and Hardart Company, so easily were American employers persuaded that European-trained bakers must be superior to Americans. In time, he was promoted to supervising the mass production of chocolate-, vanilla-, and strawberry-frosted cupcakes, desserts then much favored in the Automats in New York City. Baked at three in the morning, the cakes were moved upstairs to be placed behind the little glass doors. They were readily available to thousands of thrifty citizens by the insertion of a nickel into a slot.
In the basement kitchen he met Grete. She worked in the vegetable department. âI do cream spinach, butter carrots, and succotash,â she told him at their first encounter. The next year she agreed to marry him, his impulses and needs having been well hidden from her until the night after they signed a license before a magistrate of the City of New York. Similarly, he was unaware of her avarice, which became apparent later, after an argument about her savings and his nightly ale.
âYou are a cold woman,â he told her when she refused to part with her Central Savings Bank passbook so he could buy his necessary drink.
âYou are a goat, a pig,â she replied.
Name-calling became their unvarying form of communication. Once, while Grete lay in bed engaged in her customary fantasy of getting free of her life with
Grete poured Mrs. Ehrlichâs coffee and buttered her roll.
âBugle on time today. Campers and teachers are in Mess Hall. Flag is up like always,â Grete said in the pleasant voice she always used to the directors. She felt it necessary to make this morning report to Mrs. Ehrlich as she lay in bed, knowing she was always pleased to hear that all was going well, as usual. Mrs. Ehrlich was the picture of contentment, stretching her short, fat legs under the sheet. Grete considered it important to ingratiate herself, because Ibâs drinking threatened their security. Summer jobs were essential to them.
It was not that Grete loved Ib, not in the least, not ever. When he had too much to drink, he enjoyed using his belt on her buttocks and twisting her long hair so tightly it threatened to pull away from her head. Or he would extend her earlobes so painfully during his (never their) lovemaking as a show of force, accompanied by rough assaults on her breasts and thighs.
Every night during the summer, full of drink, he demanded that she lie down under him; every night she wished him dead. After he fell into a heavy sleep, she planned the escapes she might make if cirrhotic death or lung disease did not claim him soon. To her, their union (he was Danish, she Norwegian) was an example of mistaken intermarriage. She had agreed to it because he was about to become an American citizen and she wished to realize the promises of the golden land of America she had come to: high salaries, new automobiles, fur coats, and modern kitchens.
Ibâs motives for entering into marriage were equally crass. He had failed to find a woman in Copenhagen willing to submit for any length of time to his distinctive ways of achieving his pleasure, the same attacks he enjoyed inflicting on small animals, and upon men smaller and weaker than he. This uncontained violence, necessary to fire his arid soul and his lax sexual organ, had sent him to jail in Odensee, where he had gone to take a job as an apprentice baker and to find a willing female for his blows and pinches, yanks and drubbings.
His incarceration there had been brief. He had been found guilty of drunkenness and assault upon a prostitute, both very minor offenses. He passed his days in jail baking for the prisoners and his nights methodically, pleasurably battering himself. Freed in a few months, and sick of Denmark, he obtained a berth as a baker on a steamship and sailed to New York. Immediately he applied for his papers.
Almost as quickly he found a job with the Horn and Hardart Company, so easily were American employers persuaded that European-trained bakers must be superior to Americans. In time, he was promoted to supervising the mass production of chocolate-, vanilla-, and strawberry-frosted cupcakes, desserts then much favored in the Automats in New York City. Baked at three in the morning, the cakes were moved upstairs to be placed behind the little glass doors. They were readily available to thousands of thrifty citizens by the insertion of a nickel into a slot.
In the basement kitchen he met Grete. She worked in the vegetable department. âI do cream spinach, butter carrots, and succotash,â she told him at their first encounter. The next year she agreed to marry him, his impulses and needs having been well hidden from her until the night after they signed a license before a magistrate of the City of New York. Similarly, he was unaware of her avarice, which became apparent later, after an argument about her savings and his nightly ale.
âYou are a cold woman,â he told her when she refused to part with her Central Savings Bank passbook so he could buy his necessary drink.
âYou are a goat, a pig,â she replied.
Name-calling became their unvarying form of communication. Once, while Grete lay in bed engaged in her customary fantasy of getting free of her life with
Similar Books
